Aging Body, Ageless Soul

To our egos, change is scary. "The kids have grown up." "My friends have started dying." "My body seems to have a lot more fat on it." "I'm forgetting things lately." What we're sensing is our lack of control over our universe at that moment, and if our identities are based on identification with all the stuff around us, then a threat to any of it is a threat to our existence, and so change becomes something to avoid at all cost. And yet change is inevitable. Interesting predicament.
It turns out that the solution to the problem of change is yet another change. But what we're changing this time is who we see ourselves to be. That is, we don't have to go on clinging to the past, buying into a cultural myth of The Youthful Me, hanging on to who we used to be. We don't have to go on identifying ourselves with that being who's changing, seeing the aging process through those eyes. If we can just quiet down and look a little more deeply, we see that right behind the identity that's so caught in the story line there is... someone else. Just behind all that drama is a place of mindfulness, a place of the witness. It is a part of us that is purely equanimous, that's just watching the whole story unfold. That's what I'll call the soul.

Ram Das